Following the launch of the AMD Radeon R9 290X last week, the rumor mills have started up once again in regards to a couple of other product launches we're expecting in the coming weeks. Beginning with the Radeon R9 290, the...

Even though the 7970 didn't clearly & definitively beat the 680 one on one (heck SLi 670's could beat out CrossfireX 7970's) you could tell it never sat well with Nvidia, not having the fastest single GPU. I figured they wouldn't let the R9 be the single GPU king for long, but its still a great GPU if you don't mind some noise & average Radeon heat.

The other obvious "not-a-Titan" configurations would then be:
13SMX (2496 shader cores)

Click to expand...

Well from the leaks so far its rated to have 2496 Cuda Cores, but if they unlocked more than that, it would just be a titan with bumped core clocks and less vram. Right now, it sounds like Nvidia is trying to make it more powerful than a titan while using less cuda cores which I see as putting the final words on the titans gravestone if it turns to be true.

I mis-phrased the comment above, I meant that with the 780ti, if they unlocked beyond that, it would pretty much be a titan.

A beast would be a full 2880 core B1 step GK110 with a decent power delivery (something like MSI's 16+3+1 phase) two 8-pin connections and relaxed voltage control. The 780 Ti seems more like a binning exercise. The worst part of the whole deal is that Nvidia will leave more options in the cupboard for when AMD invariably refresh the 290X.

A beast would be a full 2880 core B1 step GK110 with a decent power delivery (something like MSI's 16+3+1 phase) two 8-pin connections and relaxed voltage control. The 780 Ti seems more like a binning exercise. The worst part of the whole deal is that Nvidia will leave more options in the cupboard for when AMD invariably refresh the 290X.

Click to expand...

You can guarantee if that ever got released, unless NVidia drops the price of the current titan down significantly a price point of 1200 bucks. Though, that would be an awesome beast of a card, but thats also a dream that I doubt would come true.

You can guarantee if that ever got released, unless NVidia drops the price of the current titan down significantly a price point of 1200 bucks. Though, that would be an awesome beast of a card, but thats also a dream that I doubt would come true.

Click to expand...

Likely that a full 2880 core GeForce card ONLY arrives once Maxwell shows up. Nvidia will replicate the Kepler launch schedule with Maxwell- mainstream parts (GPU) first, enthusiast will follow later after the HPC (GPU+ARM) contracts have been fulfilled. It stands to reason that the low/mainstream-end Maxwell could co-exist with a maxed out GK110/180 as the top part sufficing for the high-end until GM110 shows up.
That being the case then I doubt that a 2880 core GeForce would be significantly more expensive than the current cards since Nvidia's only other need for GK110 would be warranty replacements for HPC deployed Tesla's.

Damn, the R290X and GTX 780 Ti are seriously priced to sell. Considering the parts will retail for $549 and $649 respectively, and given their performance, I'd say this as good a time as any to replace an old or aging graphics card.

Fortunately, I replaced my GTX 670s with 4GB GTX 770s so I'm done for quite awhile regarding video iron but it's always good to see new hardware coming from Nvidia and AMD.